By Don Feder, Creators Syndicate

July 1994 –Nothing comes between American society and decency – except Calvin Klein and a thousand other unscrupulous hucksters who use sex to sell their schlock.

Readers will smirk over the just-published biography of the man who has dominated the fashion industry for the past quarter-century (Obsession: The Lives And Times of Calvin Klein).

Bisexuality, bowls of cocaine and Quaaludes on one side of his bed and porno videos on the other, a stint at a drug rehab center in 1988 – such carrying-on by a skinny Jewish kid from the Bronx.

Titillated by the details, we are apt to miss a salient point: There’s a symmetry between Klein’s private life and his marketing techniques – using flesh and innuendo to sell jeans, underwear and fragrances.

“Calvin Klein didn’t just become a famous sportswear designer,” says Steven Gaines, the book’s co-author. “He changed the face of American advertising; he influenced American morals.” Believe it.

From the day in 1979 when 13-year-old Brooke Shields cooed into a camera: “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” Klein has reigned as the uncrowned king of sexual exploitation.

A well-muscled young man in a shower, nude except for a strategically positioned hand holding blue jeans. A hunky dude reclining, clad only in underpants. A woman’s torso, left breast exposed, pelvis wrapped in a towel, being embraced by a man with wet hair, his eyes closed in ecstasy as he kisses her rib cage.

Rapper Marky Mark grabbing his crotch in one ad, in another posing with a bare-chested Kate Moss (Klein’s wunder waif) pressed against him. In the latest ad for the perfume Obsession, Moss lies on her belly naked, the barest hint of her bottom in view, a dumb hither expression on her vacant face.

Klein started a stampede. We’ve come a long way, baby, since the days when saying a toothpaste has “sex appeal” shocked the nation. Today, sex sells everything from exercise equipment (“a hard man is good to find”) to beer (look, it’s the Swedish bikini team parachuting in with your Old Milwaukee), from sheets to table napkins.

Ads for Georges Marciano’s Guess jeans upped the ante on Klein. One showed two pubescent girls embracing in a field, with obvious lesbian overtones. Another displays a tousled woman who seems to be struggling, slung over a man’s shoulder as she’s carried away, suggesting rape.

One theme dominates erotic advertising. Women are always young and attractive, partially clad and totally hot. Whether giddy or sulky, the message is their availability. Date rape, anyone?

“Advertising doesn’t lead society, it follows,” declared the creative director for the Young & Rubicam ad agency in the mid-’80s. Here is the standard exculpatory plea of Hollywood and other cultural polluters: “We merely reflect trends; we don’t create them.” As if the images that innundate us daily (It’s estimated children see three-quarters of a million ads by age 18.) couldn’t conceivably move us, influence attitudes, shape perceptions, motivate and activate.

We are asked to believe that motivational devices powerful enough to get the impressionable to spend $49 for 3.4 fluid ounces of perfume and $60 for a pair of blue jeans have no ability to sway us in other areas, can’t entice, deceive and seduce.

Advertising doesn’t just sell things. It also sells ideas, attitudes and conduct.

Increasingly, the ideas it propagates are subversive of the social order – a casual attitude toward sex, the exaltation of emotions, passions as the arbiter of behavior, mindless materialism and a live-for-the-moment ethos.

It detests discipline, denial and reflection. As Vincent Ryan Ruggiero notes in his book, Warning: Nonsense is Destroying America: “Because advertisements are designed to sell goods and services, irrespective of the consumers needs for them or ability to afford them, the most commonly used appeals are to self-indulgence – ‘You deserve this’; impulsiveness – ‘Don’t delay; act now’; and instant gratification – ‘You’ll feel so good.’”

That the behavior assiduously cultivated carries over to other areas of life is undeniable. That the way Madison Avenue debases and trivializes sex has a profound impact on our culture is equally obvious.

Advertising isn’t alone in this regard, but another powerful pulverizer of values. To the movies, television and music, it adds its daily dose of social solvent.

“Everybody copies him. He’s one of the few people in New York with genuinely good taste,” says a colleague of Calvin Klein – a judgment nearly as ironic as Bill Clinton’s reputed sensitivity toward the opposite sex.